Provided for non-commercial research and educational use.
Not for reproduction, distribution or commercial use.
This article was originally published in the Encyclopedia of Body Image and Human
Appearance, published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier
for the author's benefit and for the benefit of the author's institution, for
non-commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in
instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues who you know, and
providing a copy to your institution’s administrator.
All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation
commercial reprints, selling or licensing copies or access, or posting on open
internet sites, your personal or institution's website or repository, are prohibited.
For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier's
permissions site at:
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissionusematerial
Anderson-Fye EP. Anthropological Perspectives on Physical Appearance and
Body Image. In: Thomas F. Cash, editor. Encyclopedia of Body Image and Human
Appearance, Vol 1. San Diego: Academic Press; 2012. p. 15–22.
© 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Author's personal copy
Anthropological Perspectives on Physical Appearance and Body Image
EP Anderson-Fye, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
© 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Glossary
culture Shared patterns of thoughts, beliefs, behaviors,
and habits in both material and symbolic realms.
embodiment How culture “gets under the skin,” or the
relationship of how sociocultural dynamics become
translated into biological realities in the body.
emic The insider’s perspective, often related to
subjectivity.
ethnography The hallmark method of anthropological
research involving sustained participant observation.
Introduction
The discipline of anthropology takes as its task the holistic
study of humans and is often considered the broadest of the
social sciences. The discipline has been interested in the study
of human appearance since its earliest days. Early European
anthropologists, working during the ‘age of exploration’ and
the ‘age of enlightenment’, were fascinated by the variable
appearance of peoples they encountered. Questions about
diversity of appearance in terms of body size and shape, skin
color, body modification, and body ornamentation were part
of the earliest set of questions of anthropology (at that time
based in Western Europe) that wondered, “How are they
similar to or different from us?” Physical appearance, in con­
junction with other markers of difference such as language, was
used to classify groups and ask philosophical questions about
the evolution and nature of the species. Questions about phy­
sical appearance, and later body image, continued to flourish in
anthropological studies up to the present day.
Anthropology is the social science most engaged with the
concept of ‘culture’, that is, shared patterns of thoughts, beliefs,
behaviors, and habits in both material and symbolic realms. In
addition to cataloging the wide variety of human cultures,
anthropologists have asked questions about what human
appearance and body image indicate about culture as well as
what effects culture has on human appearance and body image.
Early anthropologists engaged these relationships in their pur­
suit of understanding human origins and human nature. More
recently, anthropologists have engaged them regarding ques­
tions of power relationships and structural inequality.
Anthropologists have historically worked cross-culturally both
because of interest in human diversity and because of the
difficulty in analyzing ‘culture’ in one’s own context. Culture
is so deeply ingrained as to be taken for granted. Experiencing
another cultural context in a disciplined manner has not only
been educative for the world record, but also has made more
visible many assumptions of Western culture. The comparative
method highlights what is culture-specific and what is universal
with respect to human appearance and body image.
A hallmark characteristic of a cultural anthropological
approach to the study of a topic is the investigation of the
Encyclopedia of Body Image and Human Appearance, Volume 1
ethnopsychology Local understandings of “how people
work,” or local psychological processes.
etic The outsider’s perspective, often related to
objectivity.
face validity Assessing that a measure, usually a survey
measure, makes sense on the surface to those being
administered the survey.
globalization Increased movement of ideas, ideals,
money, technologies, and people across national
boundaries.
insider or ‘emic’ point of view in addition to the outsider or
‘etic’ one. That is, anthropologists want to understand what is
important to particular people studied, what meaning is
attached to objects of study such as physical appearance or
aspects thereof, and how these understandings relate to larger
sociocultural dynamics and institutions. For anthropologists,
the object of study requires contextualization within time and
place. This sort of approach is different in emphasis from fields
like psychology or biomedicine that are more interested in
uncovering universal mechanisms and principles according to
models derived from cultures with strong academic underpin­
nings. A multidisciplinary approach engaging anthropology
and psychology in the study of human appearance and body
image is promising for combining emic and etic perspectives, a
direction that has been shown to be fruitful in global health
and in multicultural contexts. This article provides an overview
of the types of data and theory that anthropology has contrib­
uted to the study of human appearance and body image as well
as an examination of methodological innovations relevant for
contemporary studies.
Subdisciplinary Approaches within Anthropology
Anthropology contains four subdisciplines: cultural, physical
or biological, linguistic, and archaeological. Each one of these
subdisciplines has engaged with physical appearance and body
image, though the vast majority of research has been conducted
in cultural anthropology.
Cultural anthropology examines how culture affects both
group- and individual-level ideas, ideals, and practices as well
as institutions. In short, cultural anthropology applies a multi­
level analysis that focuses on studying the topic of interest as it
interacts with its sociocultural context. Cultural anthropology
also provides a rich and varied ethnographic record of how
various peoples value and make meaning of particular appear­
ances and appearance-related practices. Thus, for example,
cultural anthropologists are interested not only in the question
of how widespread globally pursuit of a thin body among
women is, but also in the local iterations of why, how this is
pursued, and how it is represented. In many Western nations, a
thin body may be considered ‘beautiful’; in rural Fiji, it may be
doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-384925-0.00003-1
15
Author's personal copy
16
Anthropological Perspectives on Physical Appearance and Body Image
considered a means to a successful end; and in urban South
Africa, it may be considered ‘sick’. Cultural anthropologists
believe that these local meanings matter significantly in under­
standing appearance and body image, particularly when
pathology is involved. In contemporary practice, cultural
anthropological and psychological studies are increasingly
coming to shared ground.
Physical or biological anthropology approaches the study of
human appearance and body image in two primary ways. First,
physical anthropologists engage in the classification of global
human diversity of the body. These classifications can be
related to the size, shape, composition, and appearance of the
body such as cataloging differences in stature, hip-to-waist
ratio, genetic composition, or biological adaptations to
extreme climates. They can also relate to the function and
performance of the body such as perception, metabolism, and
various aspects of brain function, among many others.
Biological anthropologists may investigate how dietary differ­
ences around the world affect variables such as body mass
index (BMI), heart disease prevalence, or the age of onset of
puberty in the population. Second, biological anthropology,
sometimes in conjunction with cultural anthropology, engages
in studies of embodiment. Embodiment is often defined as
“how culture gets under the skin.” Examples of recent embodi­
ment studies look at how structural inequalities such as racism
and poverty affect obesity or chronic disease rates, or how
gender inequality affects the development of eating and body
image disorders. Many physical anthropologists employ an
evolutionary perspective in their work.
Linguistic anthropology is engaged less than the aforemen­
tioned subfields in the study of human appearance and body
image; however, some key studies have been conducted, parti­
cularly in body image development. Linguistic anthropologists
may investigate how appearance is discussed or valued in a
society or in a particular language. For example, linguistic
anthropologists in the United States have documented how
young girls in particular are socialized into valuing thin bodies
in both home and school contexts through looking at their
engagement with speech surrounding ‘fat’ and ‘thin’. In a semi­
nal study contesting some common wisdom on adolescent US
girls’ speech regarding body size, the anthropologist Mimi
Nichter looked at how adolescent girls in the United States
use what she calls ‘fat talk’ to bond with each other, rather
than to police actual body size. She convincingly argues that
girls’ bantering of phrases such as “I’m so fat” among groups of
friends, which then demand the response “No, you’re not,”
serves a social bonding purpose more than actual commentary
on body size. Linguistic anthropology has been particularly
fruitful in the realm of examining socialization of groups of
people (e.g., groups based on age, gender, athletics) into parti­
cular body ideals.
Archaeologists are the least engaged in the study of human
appearance and body image compared with the other subdis­
ciplines. However, archaeologists too have added to the
understanding of human diversity, particularly across human
history. Archaeologists have been able to catalog variations
both in the body itself (especially as related to size) through
examination of human remains and in grooming and adorn­
ment practices through examination of artifacts. Of particular
interest to the study of human appearance are studies that have
cataloged social group differences throughout time in how
bodies were modified and adorned. For example, among colo­
nial burial sites in the United States, slaves were more likely to
be buried with beaded jewelry than nonslaves, and blue beads
in particular signaled African American heritage. Women were
buried with considerably more jewelry than men, and young
women with more jewelry than older women. Archaeologists
speculate about the role of jewelry in adornment to mark
important ethnic and gender identities even under highly con­
strained conditions.
Taken together, the subfields of anthropology have produced
a diverse body of knowledge in both contemporary and histor­
ical societies of human appearance and body image. The
remainder of this article examines some of the empirical and
theoretical contributions in these areas and suggests areas of
collaboration between anthropology and psychology, particu­
larly as related to methods.
Anthropological Findings in the Study of Human
Appearance
Anthropology’s interest in the study of human appearance is
both descriptive and interpretive. That is, anthropologists are
interested in cataloging the diversity of human appearance,
modifications to appearance, and adornments of appearance.
Anthropology values capturing human diversity both in and of
itself and for what systematic analysis of the diversity within
physical and social environments can tell us about human
nature, evolution, and health. In addition, with its frequent
focus on personal and local meaning, cultural anthropology
can shed light on why particular appearances are valued and
how appearance relates to social structures and power across
societies. Anthropology has especially engaged four areas of
inquiry regarding human appearance with respect to these
issues: (1) descriptive diversity of human appearance; (2) cul­
tural elaboration of particular appearances through body
adornment and body modification; (3) description and inter­
pretation of beauty ideals; and (4) human appearance as
indicative of group membership – voluntary or involuntary.
Diversity of Global Human Appearance
In terms of descriptive work, the vast ethnographic record speaks
to the diversity of human body size, shape, and other character­
istics. For example, average human height can vary by about
2 feet between different groups. Pygmy groups in sub-Saharan
Africa and elsewhere average around 4½ feet tall, whereas the
Masai of Kenya average over 6 feet tall. These two examples are
interesting especially because they co-occur under conditions of
low sustenance, thwarting a simple linear hypothesis between
nutritional status and height. Evolutionary-oriented anthropol­
ogists and biologists posit how these cases might be related to
particular environmental challenges and affordances as well as
cultural responses to them.
Physical anthropologists have described population-level
differences in BMI, a measurement very important to contem­
porary understandings of health and risk for chronic disease.
Often commented upon in biomedical and global health lit­
erature is the adiposity of Pacific Islanders who have some of
the highest average BMI calculations in the world. This issue
has also come to the fore in the context of globalization with
Author's personal copy
Anthropological Perspectives on Physical Appearance and Body Image
large numbers of Pacific Islanders migrating to multicultural
nations such as the United States, Australia, and New Zealand.
In studies of European-descended peoples, BMI is strongly
positively correlated with increased cardiovascular risks. This
relationship has been harder to document among various
groups of Pacific Islanders, and indicates that ‘obesity’ may
function differently for Pacific Islanders than for Europeans.
Such investigations that call into question static biomedical
‘truths’ are critically important to the study of global health
and to the health of multicultural populations, in addition to
the specific group being studied.
Cultural Elaboration of Appearance
Cultural anthropologists have also described how differences
in physical appearance are culturally elaborated or minimized,
and how social structures interact with physical appearance.
For example, gender differences have been a fruitful area of
study. Most societies have gendered practices of grooming and
dressing to mark local constructions of femininity and
masculinity. Such practices may be particularly vivid through
socialization processes. In countries without pronounced
initiation rituals, observing the socialization of babies
and young children may be particularly educative. In the
United States, babies are often dressed in apparel that is
color-coded (e.g., pink for girls, blue for boys), themed
(e.g., princesses for girls, trucks for boys), and constructed
differently (e.g., frills for girls, simple shapes for boys). Thus,
a quick glance indicates the gender of the child, something
considered societally important. Similarly, in parts of the
Caribbean and Latin America, infant girls’ ears are often pierced
signaling gender. In Sweden, a nation self-consciously dedi­
cated to gender equality, clothing for babies and young
children is designed to be more unisex. One high-end chil­
dren’s clothing retailer boasts, “Not for boys. Not for girls. We
make clothes for children,” in consort with national identity. In
societies with pronounced initiation rituals, such as the Sambia
of Papua New Guinea, gendered demarcation of appearance
may only begin at the time of initiation and may include
grooming practices (e.g., shaving of hair), scarification, or
adornment that signals both gender and maturity.
Another fascinating study investigating the interplay of tech­
nology and modernity with gender and appearance was
conducted by Alex Edmonds regarding plastic surgery in
Brazil. Plastic surgery in Brazil is widespread, with almost any­
one having access to it as a basic health-care right. Edmonds
makes a sophisticated argument that the beauty desired
through plastic surgery is intertwined with sexual desirability
for women of different backgrounds in varied ways that inter­
sect with, but are not isomorphic to, the role of capitalism in
this nation with bifurcated social status. In this case, Edmonds
argues that beauty per se is a unique realm of modern experi­
ence that is not simply an amalgam of other inequalities. This
elaborated case of the unique role of beauty for women dove­
tails with meta-analyses that have shown upward mobility to
be a strong risk factor in the development of problematic body
image and eating around the world. One of the reasons for risk
is the shift in attitudes about how malleable appearances are in
the first place. With modernization tends to come the belief
that bodies can be changed and worked upon, whether with
diet and exercise or with plastic surgery. In contrast, many
17
traditional peoples believe that the body is a divinely bestowed
entity that cannot (or should not) be significantly changed
through works of human will.
Beauty Ideals
Cultural anthropologists have documented varying standards
of ideal appearances and social dynamics that support beauty
ideals. A particularly interesting set of studies was edited by
Colleen Ballerino Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje in
a collection investigating the near-ubiquitous phenomenon of
beauty pageants around the world. Such pageants put idealized
gendered appearances literally on stage, but also those appear­
ances can signal deeper political or cultural dynamics as
participants battle it out for the crown. Race, ethnicity, nation­
ality, and social class may come into play in terms of who will
succeed. A particularly interesting and contemporary theme of
this work was the role of globalization in shaping pageant
beauty, and the ability to investigate underlying sociocultural
and political tensions through beauty ideals. For example, Wilk
showed how, in Belize, global standards of beauty were trick­
ling down into small local pageants since the goal for the
pageants (and the country) was to have a competitive candi­
date for international pageantry. Even if a particular girl was
not considered the most beautiful by local standards, she could
win if she might be more competitive on the global stage. Such
shifts in pageant winners corresponded with Belize’s
nation-making goals of becoming more of an international
presence and especially with respect to its relatively young but
dominant industry, tourism. Thus, this group of scholars
argued that by looking at the process and outcomes of beauty
pageants, we can also learn about societal organization and
change.
Appearance as Indicative of Group Membership
Cultural anthropologists have extensively studied how appear­
ance may signal group membership or identity. Group
membership may be voluntary or involuntary. In multiple
groups in West Africa such as the Mende of Sierra Leone,
youth experience scarification to mark their full adult belong­
ing to certain tribes. This change in appearance is highly valued
and desirable as it commands a different set of social relations
and status. In a related example of youth-driven rather than
adult-sanctioned body modification, youth identifying with
particular subcultures in industrialized nations as diverse as
England and Korea have been found to initiate piercings or
tattoos to index membership. Body adornment and grooming
are also strong signals of group membership around the world
in addition to body modification.
Some signs of identity signaled by appearance are involun­
tary. This may be due to structural inequalities, disease, or other
issues. One of the most obvious examples of this is racial
categorization by skin color and bodily features. Historically,
in the United States, the ‘one-drop’ rule was used. That is, one
drop of ‘Black’ blood categorized someone as ‘Black’ regardless
of a multicultural heritage or how they might categorize them­
selves. Even among historically African American fraternities,
the ‘brown paper bag test’ was used to categorize people. If a
partygoer had skin lighter than the paper bag, he could attend
the party; if it was darker, he would be excluded.
Author's personal copy
18
Anthropological Perspectives on Physical Appearance and Body Image
Anthropologists and other social scientists have studied how
people who are part of minority groups have used appearance
modification – through skin bleaching, plastic surgery, hair
straightening, and other technologies – to cope with discrimi­
nation and attempt appearance modification around the
world. Many of these practices are dangerous, and all speak to
how appearance is related to cultural norms, practices, and
institutions.
Historically and cross-culturally, appearance has also sig­
naled disease status, particularly in the face of pandemics. A
vivid example is in urban South Africa where rates of HIV and
AIDS remain extremely high – up to one-third of young women
are infected in some communities. Here, a thin body may
signal illness as opposed to an aesthetic ideal, but also a parti­
cular body fat distribution with reduced fat in the limbs and
face and increased central adiposity is a common effect of
antiretroviral therapies and therefore also signals disease status.
New body ideals are emerging for women in this context that
are slim but muscular in the hope of distancing oneself from
disease stigma. Historians have identified similar powerful
patterns of appearance signaling disease in the case of TB and
other pandemics.
Whether pursued from physical or cultural perspectives,
anthropologists are interested in understanding the empirical
variation of human appearance worldwide, the meanings of
appearance, and the varied relationships among appearance,
individual experience and behavior, and group- and institu­
tional-level practices and meanings. Anthropologists tend to
combine emic and etic approaches to get at this sort of multi­
level analysis.
Anthropological Study of Body Image
Due to the focus on diversity and meaning of appearance,
anthropology has had a long-standing interest in body image.
Psychological and medical anthropology have been the areas
most engaged with this topic of study. Both areas include
cultural and biological anthropology (and indeed, ‘biocultural
anthropology’ that includes elements of both subfields is a
major paradigm in both); however, cultural anthropological
studies are dominant. Psychological anthropology is interested
in local understandings of “how people work” and the applic­
ability of psychological theory that originated largely in
Western contexts to non-Western peoples. ‘Ethnopsychology’
is the term for locally relevant psychological theories. A
cross-cultural psychologist might take body image measures
(and concomitant theories) from a Western nation, translate
the language, and administer them in a non-Western context
for comparison purposes. In contrast, a psychological anthro­
pologist is more likely to begin with local participant
observation to attempt to articulate the emic conceptions of
body image and what is valued in the culture being studied
without assuming that the concepts and related measures
would be accurate in a context in which they were not created
or normed. These etic and emic ways of working can provide a
fuller picture of body image around the world than either can
alone as discussed below.
Medical anthropology relevant to body image is concerned
with both local understandings of ‘pathological’ and ‘normal’
and the medical systems such as psychiatric treatment or
traditional healing that people encounter when pathology
occurs. Thus, anthropological studies of body image have
investigated the multiple cross-cultural conceptions of what a
‘body’ is in the first place, how various cultures might experi­
ence and conceptualize what psychology calls ‘body image’,
how body image problems interact with local healing institu­
tions, and how globalization impacts all of the above.
Cross-cultural Conceptions of the Body
Anthropologists have found that the assumptions about what a
body is vary considerably around the world. Psychology and
biomedicine (including psychiatry) generally assume a body to
be a universal entity that functions approximately the same
way around the world and across time. Moreover, they assume
that there is one body per person; that is, each body is part of an
individual who is bounded by his or her skin. In contrast,
psychological and medical anthropologists have found a vari­
ety of commonly occurring conceptions and functions of the
body as well as healing systems that depend on a particular set
of assumptions about what a body is.
One simplistic but conceptually useful way these under­
standings have been categorized is as ‘individualistic’ societies
versus ‘sociocentric’ societies. In individualistic societies such
as most Western nations, bodies are seen to be individual
entities with individual rights and responsibilities. Similarly,
healing practices for adults are carried out individually. A vivid
contrast to this example is the work of the anthropologist and
psychiatrist Anne Becker. Becker has done considerable
research in rural Fiji, particularly with girls and women. She
found that the traditional ethnic Fijian understandings of body
were sociocentric; that is, multiple people were responsible for
the care and feeding of one body. Thus, a body was a shared
entity consisting of the person bounded by the skin as well as
close others in that person’s life. A robust body size was tradi­
tionally valued and signified that that person was well cared
for. There was a local illness translated to ‘going thin’. When
someone was thought to be ‘going thin’, it was not just an issue
for that person, but rather all the close others became engaged
in the diagnosis and treatment of the problem. The sickness –
and the body – was everyone’s responsibility, not just that of
the individual. Other Pacific Islander, African, Caribbean,
Asian, and Latin American cultures have been found to hold
more sociocentric views of the body. In globalizing multicul­
tural societies, such understandings are important for both
psychological and medical theory and practice.
Globalization has brought various body conceptions into
increasing contact with one another through cultural change
and migration. In the Fijian case above, Becker investigated a
‘natural experiment’ opportunity that was part of globalization.
After she had been working there investigating body image for
several years, television with Western programming was intro­
duced to the community. She was able to document pre- and
posttesting of body conceptualization, body image, and disor­
dered eating behaviors. In a stunning finding, Becker and
colleagues found a significant rise in self-reported dieting and
purging behaviors 18 months after the introduction of televi­
sion. Moreover, in qualitative interviews, Becker documented
that young women said they wanted their bodies to look like
the characters in shows like Beverly Hills, 90210 not
because they thought thin bodies were beautiful, but rather
Author's personal copy
Anthropological Perspectives on Physical Appearance and Body Image
because they seemed to be a means to a successful and glamor­
ous end, such as boyfriends, social engagements, and expensive
cars and houses. Moreover, these young women and the gen­
eration after them are showing a willingness to ‘work’ on the
individual body in ways not documented previously. This
study was the first to document that television programming
could impact body image and body conceptualization crossculturally.
In the case of migration, conflicts between individualistic
and sociocentric conceptions of the body are seen in a number
of ways. A recurring situation in immigrant and refugee health
care in the United States is when a group of family members
appear for an individual’s medical appointment. US health care
sees the medical encounter as an individual and private event,
whereas many non-Western migrants expect that the family is
involved, since cure of the body is a distributed process.
Similarly, one of the reasons immigrants and refugees are gen­
erally thought to be at higher risk for disordered eating and
body image in nations like England is because they come into
contact with Western individualized conceptions of the body
and ‘work’ on the body as an important moral discipline.
Interestingly, some East Asian immigrant groups such as
Koreans are the exception to the rule on migration increasing
the risk of disordered eating and body image. While this pattern
of Korean immigrants exhibiting lower reported rates of dis­
order than their counterparts in Korea is still under
investigation, preliminary hypotheses are that body ideals are
actually less thin in Western nations than in Korea and that
pressure for competition and self-discipline is lower than in the
home society.
Body Image and Its Disorder in Anthropology
While anthropology has contributed to the expansion of the
empirical world data on body image, perhaps its larger con­
tribution is theoretical. Anthropological research has closely
investigated questions mentioned above, such as the relation­
ship of selves, bodies, and societal organization in body image
construction. Such understandings become particularly poign­
ant when systems of body image clash, and especially in the
case of disorder. For example, cases of immigration have
repeatedly shown that if a person who is obese believes that
his or her body is beyond individual control but is placed into a
medical system that assumes individual rational actors in its
treatments, adherence is likely to be low and those treatments
are ineffective. Patient belief about bodies and body image
among other things is critical in clinical encounters.
Over the last couple of decades, the body image literature
has convincingly proven the expansion of Western ideals of
beauty, body image dissatisfaction, and body image and eating
disorders. Initial work in this direction regarding females pos­
ited a fairly straightforward causal chain of (1) changed beauty
ideals leading to (2) body image dissatisfaction through idea­
lization of thinness and fear of fatness, which would then lead
to (3) body image and eating disorders in pursuit of the thin
ideal. One of the first findings to disrupt this simplistic
explanation was that of the transcultural psychiatrist Sing
Lee working with Chinese young women in Hong Kong.
Lee found patients exhibiting all the symptoms of full-blown
eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa but without the hall­
mark characteristic of ‘fear of fatness’. Lee’s early Chinese
19
patients did not exhibit the body image dissatisfaction found
among Western patients. This finding was replicated in other
parts of Asia. These findings called diagnostic criteria such as
‘fear of fatness’ into question. They also raised the question as
to whether anorexia was a fixed universal problem, or whether
it might be many anorexias with various local instantiations.
Furthermore, Lee’s more recent patients did present with ‘fear
of fatness’ causing social commentators like Ethan Watters to
question ‘the Americanization of mental illness’ more
generally.
Becker’s work mentioned above also showed the spread of
the thin body ideal and pathological means of pursuing that
ideal among young ethnic Fijian women. However, Becker
demonstrated that contrary to the conventional wisdom, girls
did not aspire to the thin body ideal because they thought
it was attractive, because they thought their peer males found
it attractive, or because they considered it as an end in itself.
Rather, they associated the thin body ideal with a particular
lifestyle that they found desirable. A thin body was a means to
that end. Moreover, Becker found that the very conceptualiza­
tion of the body and beliefs about ‘work’ on the body changed
through girls’ interactions with global media, changes that were
essential to the emergence of Western-style pathology.
In contrast, Eileen Anderson-Fye found that even in the face
of rapid cultural change and heavy interaction with Western
economies, cultures, and people, young women in Belize were
remarkably resistant to disordered eating behaviors.
Anderson-Fye fully expected to find the mushrooming of dis­
ordered eating in rural Belize consistent with the extant
literature on the developing world at that time. Instead,
through mixed-method research, she found that while the
young women in the community rapidly incorporated other
aspects of global media and images, the thin body ideal was
not one of them. She found that the Belizean girls had an
ethnopsychology based around self-protection and self-care
that they used to filter messages from globalization. In this
process, behaviors such as restricting food, excessive exercise,
or purging were filtered out as untenable and undesirable.
Moreover, while female beauty was incredibly important in
this community, body shape was more important than body
size. An idealized curvy body, either naturally or adorned by
clothing choice, was accessible to almost any girl. The few girls
in the community who were showing eating pathology were
tied economically to the global tourism industry and were
directed to lose weight to be more attractive to Western tourists
rather than reporting (by interviews or surveys) body dissatis­
faction. This case was considered an ‘ethnographic veto’ to the
world data on the spread of eating disorders to places with
similar conditions of globalization and also added to the lit­
erature complexifying the relationships between body image
and disordered eating.
Finally, anthropologists have also investigated the impor­
tance of the role of body conceptualization and societal
organization in eating disorder treatment programs. Rebecca
Lester conducted a fascinating ethnographic comparison
between a major eating disorder treatment clinic in Mexico
City, Mexico, and one in the Midwestern United States. She
found that the psychiatric model for ‘health’ and the goals for
recovery in each clinic were different and embedded within the
local cultural and moral contexts. In the Mexican clinic pro­
gram, based loosely on a 12-step model, families were a critical
Author's personal copy
20
Anthropological Perspectives on Physical Appearance and Body Image
component of the recovery process and young women were
treated as part of a social web, consistent with a more familistic
and sociocentric society. In the US case, individuals were trea­
ted as rational actors with goals of self-sufficiency, consistent
with individualistic goals. Lester demonstrates how models of
personhood, development, gender, and morality must ‘fit’ with
the therapeutic model in order to be most effective. Thus, she
also begs the questions in evidence-based treatment programs
of whom the evidence comes from and whom it is used.
Anthropological research has provided us with additional
models of global body image as well as pushed our under­
standings of theoretical models of how globalization impacts
body image, pathology, as well as responses to and treatments
of pathology.
Methodological Innovations
The methods of anthropology are different in important ways
from those of disciplines such as psychology and psychiatry
that dominate the study of human appearance and body
image. These differences are explained by the epistemological
differences in the fields. Most academic psychology, for exam­
ple, is oriented toward the pursuit of universal mechanisms of
human behavior. The experimental method, presumed to be
widely generalizable, is still the gold standard in the behavioral
sciences. Recently, social scientists in Canada published a
groundbreaking paper discussing the scientific problems with
basing broad universal claims on samples drawn entirely from
Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic
(WEIRD) societies, and usually college students. Such samples
are not representative of the diversity of the societies from
which they come, let alone other societies. Anthropologists
have also pointed out the problems with assuming that how
someone behaves in a lab is similar to how that person may
behave in a plethora of real-life situations. Psychologists have
pointed out that theories tested on one age-group may or may
not be relevant for those at other developmental life stages.
In more biologically oriented research, the human body is
assumed to function more or less the same way everywhere.
This assumption has been repeatedly proven problematic but
still stands. For example, the metabolism of many drugs has
been proven to vary not only by gender but also by other
group-level genetically linked factors. In the example regarding
the relationship between obesity and risk for heart disease
mentioned above, differences have been found between
Pacific Islanders and people of European heritage, though
the exact reasons for these differences are unknown.
Neuroscientists using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) studies relevant to body image have pointed out that it
is an empirical unknown whether all brains around the world
function the same way as for the subjects who tend to enroll in
neuroimaging studies at major Western universities. Nascent
immigrant data suggest that there might be important cultural
differences, even though biomedicine would posit a universal
human brain. Such differences matter, and biomedicine is
increasingly aware of this fact. Anthropologist-physicians have
been at the forefront of work examining what is often referred
to as ‘local biology’ that recognizes significant variations rele­
vant to global health.
Robust quantitative survey measures play a critically impor­
tant role in the study of body image. Studies based on this
method are the backbone of our cross-cultural comparative
data on body image and provide reliable data. Examples of
these measures include the Stunkard body weight/shape figural
stimuli and various body image and eating attitudes inven­
tories. However, typical cross-cultural psychology studies do
not investigate the validity of such measures. A classic example
of the problems born from this privileging of reliability over
validity comes from the work of Daniel Le Grange published in
a collection of work showing a range of psychological and
anthropological measures. Le Grange had been one of a num­
ber of psychiatrists to conduct research on body image and
eating in South Africa. The surveys collected there consistently
showed high levels of disordered eating among Black South
Africans, a group that theoretically should not be at risk for
disordered eating, given what was known in the literature.
Moreover, the males reported rates as high as the females did,
another unusual pattern. Le Grange decided to investigate
further by conducting short qualitative interviews. After only
a handful of interviews, he realized that the thousands of
previously collected and reliable surveys were invalid. Among
other reasons, he discovered that the South African students
were endorsing problems such as food preoccupation and
binge eating due to poverty and hunger, not self-starvation.
This restudy shows the importance of including validity, even
in comparative quantitative measures.
In contrast to survey-based comparative studies, ethnogra­
phy is the hallmark technique of anthropology. Ethnography
usually involves sustained interactions with members of a
community for a period of at least a year or through all the
local seasons (winter/spring/summer/fall, rainy/dry, etc.).
Ethnography is aimed at understanding the insider’s
perspective, though external measures such as anthropo­
morphic measurements or standardized surveys are
common. Ethnographers engage in participant observation
as well as in various types of qualitative interviewing.
Participant observation is a method of semidetached obser­
ving and recording aspects of everyday life while being
involved with the activities and community. Ethnographers
are trained to become aware of and attempt to minimize their
own biases in the research as they become a sort of naive
participant in a local cultural setting. With this close, daily
attention, ethnography attempts to grasp an experience-near
understanding of a phenomenon such as body image in local
context. Usually, results are written up as detailed case studies
on their own terms. Ethnographic research tends to maximize
validity. While there may be generalizable findings in ethno­
graphy, replicability can be difficult since so much relies on
the individual ethnographer and his or her particular experi­
ences and relationships. Additionally, it is a labor-intensive
type of work that requires the ability of a researcher to remove
himself or herself from his or her own daily life for a year or
more.
Each method of research such as experiments, surveys, eth­
nography, and interviews has costs and benefits. Contemporary
research in both anthropology and psychology is coming closer
to realizing the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration that
attends to both validity and reliability, local meaning, and
cross-cultural comparison. In fact, given the increasing role of
body image and eating problems around the world, the World
Author's personal copy
Anthropological Perspectives on Physical Appearance and Body Image
Health Organization has flagged these problems as high prior­
ity, especially for adolescents. Psychological and medical
anthropologists often include standardized measures in their
multimethod repertoires and can contextualize them with eth­
nographic data. Increasingly, psychologists are looking for
feasible ways to increase validity especially in the case of min­
ority cultural groups on whom the measures were not normed.
Similarly, psychologists are concerned about these measures in
the case of younger children, since most child-related work in
this field has been done with older adolescents.
An example of a simple method from anthropological
research that may aid psychological survey-based research is
‘face validity’. Face validity, as it sounds, is making sure that
the questions in a survey are asking what one intends them to
in a sample different from the population where the test
originated. While anthropologists who use surveys often
have detailed ethnographic data to apply to their knowledge
of survey questions, psychologists understandably may not
have this information. However, several studies have shown
that even a small sample of qualitative feedback on survey
questions and concepts prior to survey administration can
make a significant difference in the validity of the findings.
A cost-effective way to gather these data is to ‘talk through’ the
survey findings with a small number of participants represen­
tative of the target sample. Asking each participant what they
think the question means, what possible answers might mean,
and to speak aloud other thoughts about the survey can point
to translational problems, conceptual problems, and specific
directions that would be helpful to participants. Thematic
saturation, the repetition of themes from individual partici­
pants, is often a sign that potential problems have been
discovered and can be obtained with a small number of
interviewees. With this kind of relatively simple method, pre­
sumably some of the cultural problems Le Grange and others
have encountered could be prevented. Anderson-Fye used this
method to uncover problems with body shape questionnaires
that are based on only size, not shape, with adolescent girls in
Belize. Further research showed shape to be a more important
body image dimension than size. Such a method may also be
helpful in investigating how valid survey measures might be
for children younger than those for whom a survey was
designed.
Other anthropologists have collaborated with psychologists
and psychiatrists in collecting data, interpreting results, or both.
These cross-disciplinary teams, such as that of clinical psychol­
ogist Kathleen Pike and the anthropologist Amy Borovoy
working on body image in Japan, can provide a level of both
depth and comparability urgently needed. Some of the inno­
vative work on male muscularity and body image by David
Frederick and others also accesses these cross-disciplinary
teams.
In the context of globalization, the anthropologist Eileen
Anderson-Fye and the statistician Jielu Lin found that the
Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26) was robust enough to pick
up behavioral issues separate from attitudinal issues in a
rapidly developing community in Belize. Analyzing the data
by these categories rather than by the total score or pre­
viously found components was predictive of body image
satisfaction. In this society, analyzing the relationship
between behavior and attitudes was a more robust and sen­
sitive way to use the measure. They suggest that looking at
21
attitudes and behavior separately, as well as their relation­
ship, may be a more useful direction than traditional
analyses with this measure in contexts of cultural change
such as migration and globalization.
Conclusions
In the contemporary world, with increasing globalization
and migration that cause cultures to come into contact
with each other and change with more frequency and inten­
sity, culturally valid yet comparable data on human
appearance and body image are needed. Anthropological
approaches, with their emphasis on emic perspectives, sub­
jective experience, meaning, context, and validity, can bring
valuable insight into psychological and biomedical or psy­
chiatric approaches to the study of these issues. Cultural,
physical, and biocultural anthropology work descriptively to
catalog human diversity in terms of appearance, adornment,
and body modification as well as conceptualization of the
body, the relationship of body to person, and body image.
Furthermore, in addition to descriptive differences, anthro­
pologists from all the subfields contribute interpretive and
theoretical insights to help us better understand relation­
ships among biology, personhood, body image, and social
organization in any society. While anthropological
approaches are a minority perspective in the larger studies
of human appearance and body image, they are increasingly
necessary and relevant, and have provided a set of innova­
tive studies from which the fields can build.
See also: Anthropometry; Body Art: Tattooing and Piercing;
Body Image among African Americans; Body Image among
Asian Americans; Body Image among Hispanics/Latinos;
Body Image and Gender Roles; Body Image and Social Class;
Body Image in Non-Western Societies; Body Image in Social
Contexts; Evolutionary Perspectives on Physical Appearance;
Feminist Perspectives on Body Image and Physical
Appearance; Media Influences on Female Body Image; Media
Influences on Male Body Image; Muscularity and Body Image;
Race, Ethnicity, and Human Appearance; Self-Mutilation and
Excoriation; Skin Color; Sociocultural Perspectives on Body
Image.
Further Reading
Anderson-Fye, E. P. (2009). Cross-cultural issues in body image and eating problems
among children and adolescents. In: Smolak, L., and Thompson, J. K. (eds.) Body
Image, Eating Disorders, and Obesity in Youth: Assessment, Prevention, and
Treatment, 2nd ed., pp. 144–174. Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Anderson-Fye, E. P. (2011). Body images in non-Western cultures. In: Cash, T. F., and
Smolak, L. (eds.) Body Image: A Handbook of Science, Practice, and Prevention,
2nd ed., pp. 244–252. New York: Guilford Press.
Anderson-Fye, E. P., and Becker, A. E. (2003). Sociocultural aspects of eating disorders.
In: Thompson, J. K. (ed.) The Handbook of Eating Disorders and Obesity,
pp. 565–589. New York: Wiley.
Anderson-Fye, E. P., and Lin, J. (2009). Belief and behavior aspects of the
EAT-26: The case of schoolgirls in Belize. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry
33, 623–638.
Author's personal copy
22
Anthropological Perspectives on Physical Appearance and Body Image
Becker, A. E. (ed.) (2004). New global perspectives on eating disorders. Culture,
Medicine, and Psychiatry. Special Issue 28, 433–623.
Becker, A. E. (2005). Body, Self, and Society: The View from Fiji. Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania.
Cohen, C. B., Wilk, R., and Stoeltje, B. (1995). Beauty Queens on the Global Stage:
Gender, Contests, and Power. New York: Routledge.
Csordas, T. (ed.) (2001). Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture
and Self. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Edmonds, A. E. (2010). Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lee, S., Ho, T. P., and Hsu, L. K. G. (1993). Fat phobic and non-fat phobic anorexia
nervosa: A comparative study of 70 Chinese patients in Hong Kong. Psychological
Medicine 23, 999–1017.
Le Grange, D., Louw, J., Breen, A., and Katzman, M. (2004). The meaning of
‘self-starvation’ in impoverished Black adolescents in South Africa. Culture,
Medicine, and Psychiatry 28, 439–461.
Lester, R. J. (2007). Critical therapeutics in two eating disorders treatment centers.
Medical Anthropology Quarterly 21, 369–387.
Nasser, M., Katzman, M. A., and Gordon, R. A. (eds.) (2001). Eating Disorders and
Cultures in Transition. New York: Taylor & Francis.
Nichter, M. (2000). Fat Talk: What Girls and their Parents Say about Dieting. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Puoane, T., Tsolekile, L., and Steyn, N. (2010). Perceptions about body image and sizes
among black African girls living in Cape Town. Ethnicity & Disease 20, 29–34.
Watters, E. (2010). Crazy Like us: The Globalization of the American Psyche. New York:
Free Press.